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a reaction formation. I refuse to accept my image of myself. I think
he's cute too."
Ben said, "You see what I mean. She has insight, a native gift.
She is the master of the innocuous apothegm. 'He's cute too.' Could
Lil ever say anything like that?"
I -said I thought she could. But Ben answered that it didn't
matter, and launched into a recital of Tibby's virtues, while Tibby
kept looking at him with bemused detachment. Mter the last breakup
with
Lil,
Ben said he felt like commiting suicide, but despite his
despondency he knew that suicide was a failure of moral commitment.
He had gone to the Cedar Street Bar for a drink, and Tibby was
sitting at a table in the back. She told him about her break with
Merle, and suggested that they try something together. She meant it
as
a joke, but Ben said why not. Tibby moved in that night, and
Ben had his first successful love-making in months.
"Do you know what it is to make real love?" he said. "I told
my doctor that it was a bourgeois myth kept alive for the sake of
promoting wish-fulfilling fantasies and to keep the advertising business
going. Did you see that piece in
Commentary
on 'Eros as Money–
Making Myth'? It may be true, but nobody has ever seen the
archetypal force of the pure, private act. It is positively prelapsarian."
Just then Tibby farted.
"Oops," she said, and I noticed that she had learned not to
blush as she had done at Marsha's.
Ben turned on her. "What kind of a stupid thing is that to do?"
"I had gas," Tibby said.
About a month later I met Larry and Marsha coming out of the
8th Street Playhouse.
Paths of Glory
was playing. "Film-making of
the highest order," Larry said, "absolutely devastating exposure of the
military
mind. But why cast that right-wing bastard Menjou 1 can't
understand." Marsha thought Larry looked like Kirk Douglas without
the cleft. We went to the Limelight for capuccino.
"There's Wilder Benjamin, the movie critic of the
Voice,"
Marsha
said. "Do you know that he was Lil's first boy friend in the Village?"
"Can you believe it," Larry said, "Ben and
Lil
are together
again. Lil's fling with Merle lasted about a week. Merle came to me
and told me that my image haunted the bedroom. He couldn't even
get an erection."
"And Ben," Marsha added, "had a terrible fight with Tibby.
